Compassion, respect for all living things no matter the colour or gender, how to live healthy and physically active, financial literacy. Most of these things have a huge role model part.
Don't give him a screen mounted to the stroller.
Remember that while still being unborn the child will get acquainted with you voice and time if voice. Once born he will observe you and how you conduct yourself from very early on; how you treat others, how you swear, how you treat your wife, and nowadays your device pickup habits too.
My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
If you have rent or a mortgage, there is little more important than paying it. Everything else comes after. Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending.
I'm not against things like learning to play an instrument, but if you're going to major in Music Theory, you better have a solid plan for a career on the other end. It can be a risky plan, but it has to be real with non-zero odds of success. It can't be just because you love playing the violin.
If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
"Hey, Muse, read me this article". Voila, your kids know how to read. Deciphering marks on paper can be as obsolete as lightning a fire without matches, with the advent of technology.
> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.
Not to mention physics, which is useful for understanding why things are the way they are. Which, is an important skill lest you fall into anti intellectual traps like flat earthism.
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
But give a boy until the age of 7 and he's ours for life, is what that old order of the monks said about values. What do you do for the remaining 11 years?
Yeah, but that doesn't mean, that parents can't give their children a head start by teaching them stuff, that will smarten them up or help them understand stuff at school.
I remember my father taught me how to divide numbers and somewhat how to multiply them, before we learned that at school, with his own explanations. For multiplication he taught me indirectly, by making "number tables" with me:
Up to 20. I used to bring them to school and teachers were discouraging, not realizing, what a great thing this was and what kind of insight it could allow a child to have into basic operations.
For division, he often said: "How often does one number fit into the other?" as a way of explaining that operation.
Ah and he also taught me about negative numbers, when other kids at school didn't even understand what that was supposed to be, and teachers still wanted us to write "not solvable", instead of the correct answer, which were negative numbers. How silly.
When the time came and we learned about division and fractions, I had an easy time to understand what the teacher explained, due to knowing an intuition about what division actually means. The hardest thing for me was not dividing numbers, but following that methodical procedure to divide in the written form, digit by digit. Something I had done in my head already, when thinking about that some number "fits into another number" only half, ergo must be 0.5 added to the number of times it fits in there whole. Only that I didn't realize immediately, that this written way of dividing 2 numbers was the same thing actually.
In this way parents can make school life and learning soooo much easier and less painful for their kids. Granted, I did seem to have a gift for calculation in primary school, but what was so casually taught to me by my father every now and then, helped tremendously. It wasn't even like strict hours of learning. It was just using chances to show me stuff.
From my mother I learned to actually pay attention how I write words. Initially, my spelling was only OKish, not great, until one day I somehow realized "Hey I just have to think a little and pay attention." and suddenly had good spelling. But this didn't come about, without my mother sitting down with me and complaining about my handwriting and also once or twice forcing me to do some writing. My handwriting is still no good though. Glad that didn't influence my grades. I write better Chinese characters, than German words, apparently.
If I had children, I would definitely try to teach them such things. Even if it is just how to look at something or what to pay attention to, or small calculation tricks. I would try to make their learning easier and offer support when they need it to learn.
Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
We're moving more slowly on physical robotics in varied environments, so it's going to take a while before we automate reaching under the sink and turning a knob. Or maybe your kids will have a bright future in janitorial work, who knows?
It kills me that education is not a solved problem --- we have many of the same hurdles which the Greeks faced, and apparently, one of the best schools which I ever attended is no longer run as it once was (classes were divided between academic and social, the latter were attended at one's age level (homeroom, phys. ed, social studies, &c.) and academic classes were attended at one's grade level with teachers at the combined elementary/high school also being accredited as faculty at a nearby college and students being able to continue on to university level study until such time as they had attended their 12th year of education, with the possibility of being awarded not only a high school diploma, but also a college degree, or at least being afforded a transcript of college-level studies to apply at the school of their choice.
One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.
The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.
> "...Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good."
Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout.
> "Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out.
"
That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics.
As for the original question, "If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet
> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be
> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us
These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.
A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.
I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class. And the culture is so much more anti-intellectual than it was back then...
That’s just a moniker wealthy elites who feel more connected to other wealthy elites in largely indistinguishable major metropolitan cities, than they do to people from any specific place or nation.
But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.
I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas). Arguably, the most important skills going forward are the ability to think independently and critically, to adapt to new circumstances, to formulate one's thoughts in a coherent and convincing manner, and to understand things in a broader historical perspective.
I'm not sure how widespread this meme (in the general sense, not the internet fad sense) is, but I came across it theorized by this humanities account, Adam Walker - Close Reading Poetry:
Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well. If you ask me, my prediction is that humanities and liberal arts as organized schools of thought are going to fall even more to the wayside unless you’re very rich. It’s going to be replaced by cultural memes and other short relatable digestible pieces of “community” knowledge kind of like a lot of the youth already.
> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal
I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.
While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.
Humans as individuals and groups will fight tooth and nail to "have more" because that is our nature. Money was a brilliant invention that allowed people to get what they want without forcefully taking it from someone else, or having a particular skill or thing that you could barter.
No they won't..like, observably they won't. This is a problem almost every entrepreneur who looked at small businesses as a start up opportunity ran into immediately: most small businesses are run by people who are exactly happy with where they got to, and so showing up and promising you'll expand the business goes over as well as a lead balloon.
You can demand whatever you want, but most people are not going to be with you. Very few people at least in the US are going to agree with the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor. You can suggest some form of workable socialism, which would be good, but I am mainly referring to the transition phase between now and some sort of utopian future where resources are unlimited and robots do all of our physical and mental labor. That transition period is going to last decades or for the rest of our lives and most of the early period, at the very least, for our kids.
>Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well
What you've just stated is a Marxist/materialist perspective. Up to a certain point of meeting basic survival needs, it's probably true. But there are other ways to think about what ultimately determines human goals once survival needs are met. This illustrates my point about the humanities, often we put our thinking into boxes without realizing that the box exists at all.
To be adaptive. That's going to be the most valuable skill going forward, to be able to adapt to any and all circumstances that may come your way because it is going to be a rough ride for at least the next decade and possibly much longer than that.
I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.
That's always been an important skill (at least in the last couple hundred years as far as I can tell).
Industrial revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, the shift of technology over time.
Hell, they say that the reason millennials are so nostalgic and enjoy childish things is because of rapid technological and societal change in the last 30 years.
I doubt it'll slow down, the era of doing anything until you die was a foolish thing for even our grandparents generation.
That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree. In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture. It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels. Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
> That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree.
I strongly disagree with that.
> In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture.
Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere. One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal.
> It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels.
Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
> Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it.
The time when a single skill would get you from the cradle to the grave is over and done with. And probably has been for a while but it is going to be much more fractured going forward.
School only worked for me because it forced structure onto my learning. Live lectures rarely engaged me, math and physics aside. So traditional teaching wasn't the draw. What mattered were the guardrails: quarterly exams, a peer group to measure myself against, and a pace that forced me to push past initial boredom until a subject clicked.
Without clear goalposts, external accountability, and support, self paced learning feels like running in a desert. You just end up going in circles. That’s exactly why MOOCs never worked for me, nor for thousands of others.
Your description feels very apt. I was great in a classroom but I've done poorly learning alone outside of it. Do you have any recommendations on how to pick up new subjects and material after college?
> That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what.
Partially agreed.
Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.
It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.
The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.
So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.
Based on my experiences with the teachers my kids had a decade or so ago, all you would have to do is find a way to test for it and then put it on the state-mandated test that is used to evaluate schools.
Often the only thing that is taught is what is on those tests.
Could essentially be saying, obey and work. A lot of people won't agree that is the ideal life. If that's not how you interpreted it then you have my point.
Questions are more powerful than answers.
My kids are 29 & 31 now. I'd suggest that they master how to ask well formed questions.
Also, "The medium is the message" is from Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964)
I really like that paragraph in the article. We have more access to knowledge and other resources than ever in history, and yet not everyone is a Renaissance Man.
Availability of resources does not entail skill in leveraging them. I'm not sure classical eduction is the best way to learn that, but it's certainly better than nothing and a useful first step.
Tangentially related, but thinking about what to teach your kid years into the future before it's even born has a bit of an unhealthy touch to it. Take it step by step and especially don't pressure your kid with high expectations.
We finally have a chance to bring up our kids with kindness as the main charesterstic to improve. Given they wont have to compete for limited resources like we had. We get crushed, scammed and trampled on if show any kindness.
Teach your children about the things you love. Partially because children often don’t fall far from the tree, and mostly so they can learn how to enjoy something.
If I were to distill my educational opinions into a soundbite, it would sound very similar to the rule of happiness on submarines:
“Teach them to create more happiness than they destroy, for others as much as themselves. For we are a finite planet, with nowhere else to go, and thus we all have an obligation to make this sole home the best and happiest place it can be.”
It’s to not bet that tomorrow’s solution might solve today’s problems, but to fix them as they arise. It’s cleaning up your own messes rather than relying on others to clean up after you. It’s not self-sufficiency, but planetary sufficiency, and navigating the impossibly complex systems that influence and impact those outcomes.
Let the children choose their specifics, and connect them with educators and mentors who will nurture their unique learning styles and growth patterns to full blossom. Otherwise, teach them that there is a finite amount of happiness on this planet, and we must do our best to ensure there’s always enough to go around for everyone.
And most importantly of all, never let someone else convince you that you or your passions are irrelevant or replaceable. Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.
I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.
> and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?
Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore.
5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there.
Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling.
Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.
That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.
Well since the world has just restarted the geopolitical situation from before WW2 (every country for themselves), how about you help your son to become a doctor? You know, a medical doctor. It will require lots of teaching.
The US has somewhat stepped out (been forced out of the arbiter role, frankly, much to everyone's delight) and this was supposedly going to be bad for the US since "everybody else will step in and get the goodwill the US gives up" ... and it's pretty clear now that in reality nobody stepped in and the animus to step in is at an all-time low and dropping further. It has to get a lot worse before we'll even consider (spending the money) to make it better again.
And, no worries! The EU will save us! Or so they claim ... what they mean is they will use economic sanctions to fix things! (They're "free", as don't require budget allocations and so no political conflicts, and very useful for political corruption). Except of course free is between quotes because there is a reason every economist hates them: they are in fact more expensive than just about anything else. But no budget line item!
Oh, in negotiation theory I'm of the opinion that economic sanctions cause wars rather than solve them. Wars are started because one party feels they can improve their economic situation through physical conquest. Add sanctions and there's two options: give in to sanctions (which means you have lost the war, and so have to give up anything the sanctioning side wants, or they'll just sanction you again), or win the war (which will give the opposing side no choice but to give up sanctions, since there's nothing to be gained anymore, and the sanctions will hurt them too). Obviously this means it's not just dictators that will react to sanctions with aggression, everybody will. There's even the problem that they may generate the worst possible outcome. Situation: 2 parties are at war. Someone imposes economic sanctions "to help", but sanctions inevitably also hurt others. Shortly afterwards 5 parties are at war. Oh, and historically economic sanctions have caused far more wars than they have solved, and have in fact dragged more countries into wars they initially didn't participate in.
So that's what the world has decided to do (not the US, in fact I would argue the US was the party that had the least to do with this decision, because the US absolutely didn't choose to lose it's overwhelming economic and military advantage, everyone else very slowly took it away without taking over security. Deciding, in fact, again and again and again, to let security slip further. This was not "a slippery slope", but governments worldwide taking vote after vote after vote to never do anything about an aggressor, time and time again. But, of course, this is not how it will be presented in the press)
Anyway back to why doctor would be good:
1) lots of them will be necessary since obviously lots of countries will be free to wage war on one another without having to face the US as well and so ... they will wage war on one another
You know, what the UN GA, and the "non-aligned movement" have worked for, for decades now. I feel like someone should walk into that meeting, smile like doctor Strange did at the end of that movie, and point out the obvious to these delegates that finally got what they wanted for decades: "Congratulations! You just got everything you ever wanted. You're NOT going to like it!"
2) the rest of the world will get more and more entangled with specific conflicts (Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, no doubt dozens of conflicts that probably have already started but they're not on the news constantly yet ...) and will feel the necessity to "interfere", which will bring loads of countries into one war or another
This will be especially true since those countries that have started small wars are where our raw materials are mined (you know, what we absolutely positively cannot do without).
3) doctors don't have to fight, even an army in a desperate situation would be mad to send doctors to the front
4) not only do they not have to fight, BOTH sides actively avoid attacking doctors. Even hamas has shown consideration for Jewish medical facilities in their attacks.
5) oh and doctors are both an absolute necessity and the ultimate luxury in one neat package, so doctors do well during economic disaster periods AND during periods where things go well
6) it's actually hard to be a doctor, so there won't be excessive competition and your kid will actually learn a lot
7) anything a doctor does is good. It a very morally unambiguous profession, and lots of people will be forced to make questionable choices in the next decades ... and doctors have the moral luxury that they simply will do their best to minimize the impact of those decisions on actual living humans. That impact will be horrible, obviously, but a doctor can actually help
how about you help your son to become a doctor? You know, a medical doctor.
I don't know. I was at my doctor's office a few weeks ago, and the topic of AI came up during our conversation[1]. I expressed the opinion that her profession should be fairly safe because it's so highly regulated and how doctors have the AMA to block new entrants. She said that her and her colleagues had literally just been talking about how they are worried about their jobs, and pointed out that with profit-obsessed private equity firms taking over more and more medical practices, she thought they very much would be trying to replace human doctors with AI. And she alluded to the AMA being a much less effective lobbying body than what I, as an outsider to the field, had perhaps believed.
I dunno. That's just an n=1 anecdote, but if nothing else it shows that (at least some) doctors are not just sitting back and resting easy, assured of a future of high paying career options. And this is a lady with a degree from Yale, who is a Doctor of Internal Medicine, and working for a very large and prestigious medical practice. Not some half-educated nitwit at a random back-country medical practice.
[1]: I mentioned that I'd asked ChatGPT about some test results, and told her what it told me. She replied "Yeah, I agree with that." Then chuckled and said something like "God, did I just agree with ChatGPT?" That's what started the whole sidebar about AI.
I feel the word 'son' carries a lot of heft here - if it were 'what will I teach my child' the expectation of passing on an economically-viable craft would feel less urgent.
But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal?
If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.
> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.
We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.
Compassion, respect for all living things no matter the colour or gender, how to live healthy and physically active, financial literacy. Most of these things have a huge role model part. Don't give him a screen mounted to the stroller.
Remember that while still being unborn the child will get acquainted with you voice and time if voice. Once born he will observe you and how you conduct yourself from very early on; how you treat others, how you swear, how you treat your wife, and nowadays your device pickup habits too.
you cant teach these, the kid will naturally pick up and learn from parents and the environment.
so the best way to teach your kids is to teach yourself to be a better person
you can absolutely teach those
My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
> how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
If you have rent or a mortgage, there is little more important than paying it. Everything else comes after. Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending.
I'm not against things like learning to play an instrument, but if you're going to major in Music Theory, you better have a solid plan for a career on the other end. It can be a risky plan, but it has to be real with non-zero odds of success. It can't be just because you love playing the violin.
Music can do so much more than just paying rent. You can impress your future wife with your playing or singing. It's a form of therapy for many.
It's true it won't pay the bills, but knowing one instrument is a good skill that differentiates you from others.
Your college major doesn't determine your career path, and the sooner people stop pretending that they are necessarily correlated, the better.
I'm not suggesting a career. I'm saying those three things are always valuable to learn.
Somehow they read "learning a musical instrument" as "majoring in music".
The traditional career for people studying music theory is acquiring wealthy parents.
That’s called strawmanning.
> Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
And yet the highest earning people I know who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds are musically and linguistically talented.
Focusing on what the market demands is chasing a moving target and if you miss the boat you might just end up a low-level peon holding a wrench.
Maybe it comes down to whether you advocate for live-to-work or work-to-live.
If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
"Hey, Muse, read me this article". Voila, your kids know how to read. Deciphering marks on paper can be as obsolete as lightning a fire without matches, with the advent of technology.
There won’t be a labor market any more, unless there’s some technological barrier for AIs and robots that has not appeared yet.
It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.
Most of the major mass starvation events in modern history were caused by some form of socialism.
> socialism or mass starvation
From what history shows, there's not much difference between the two.
> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.
[delayed]
i mean even basic differentiation is useful for optimization problems.
Not to mention physics, which is useful for understanding why things are the way they are. Which, is an important skill lest you fall into anti intellectual traps like flat earthism.
Calculus is a shared language in the grand universal ocean of intellectual cultural. Rejecting calculus is rejecting part of that culture…
I dunno, my parents were correct about my STEM education that was basically shoved up my ass as soon as I showed any science/engineering aptitude.
I'd say giving them the tools to make good decisions will naturally lead them to a particular path, why not push that path as well?
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
One can downshift into a lower income more enjoyable job, but one cannot up shift into a higher income job without the required education.
Besides for many people the higher income job is more enjoyable, especially when the lower income job takes a large physical toll.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
its a lottery.
But give a boy until the age of 7 and he's ours for life, is what that old order of the monks said about values. What do you do for the remaining 11 years?
OK, sure.
Now what does that look like concretely? Still sending them to school for several hours a day, 5 days a week? Doing what during those hours?
School is half about babysitting while the parents work. So... yes. Kids will still have to go somewhere during the day. Might as well be a school.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean, that parents can't give their children a head start by teaching them stuff, that will smarten them up or help them understand stuff at school.
I remember my father taught me how to divide numbers and somewhat how to multiply them, before we learned that at school, with his own explanations. For multiplication he taught me indirectly, by making "number tables" with me:
Up to 20. I used to bring them to school and teachers were discouraging, not realizing, what a great thing this was and what kind of insight it could allow a child to have into basic operations.For division, he often said: "How often does one number fit into the other?" as a way of explaining that operation.
Ah and he also taught me about negative numbers, when other kids at school didn't even understand what that was supposed to be, and teachers still wanted us to write "not solvable", instead of the correct answer, which were negative numbers. How silly.
When the time came and we learned about division and fractions, I had an easy time to understand what the teacher explained, due to knowing an intuition about what division actually means. The hardest thing for me was not dividing numbers, but following that methodical procedure to divide in the written form, digit by digit. Something I had done in my head already, when thinking about that some number "fits into another number" only half, ergo must be 0.5 added to the number of times it fits in there whole. Only that I didn't realize immediately, that this written way of dividing 2 numbers was the same thing actually.
In this way parents can make school life and learning soooo much easier and less painful for their kids. Granted, I did seem to have a gift for calculation in primary school, but what was so casually taught to me by my father every now and then, helped tremendously. It wasn't even like strict hours of learning. It was just using chances to show me stuff.
From my mother I learned to actually pay attention how I write words. Initially, my spelling was only OKish, not great, until one day I somehow realized "Hey I just have to think a little and pay attention." and suddenly had good spelling. But this didn't come about, without my mother sitting down with me and complaining about my handwriting and also once or twice forcing me to do some writing. My handwriting is still no good though. Glad that didn't influence my grades. I write better Chinese characters, than German words, apparently.
If I had children, I would definitely try to teach them such things. Even if it is just how to look at something or what to pay attention to, or small calculation tricks. I would try to make their learning easier and offer support when they need it to learn.
> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver. My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
Mona Lisa Vito, is that you?
I think her husband was a lawyer... but the utes will be alright.
Future husband...
Can't make that comment without Positraction.
Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.
We're moving more slowly on physical robotics in varied environments, so it's going to take a while before we automate reaching under the sink and turning a knob. Or maybe your kids will have a bright future in janitorial work, who knows?
> Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds
I feel like this is a crazy take. Smart (and motivated) people are better at adapting to a different world than not smart people.
By the time they reach adulthood this aspect of robotics will be solved. I give it about 5 years.
It kills me that education is not a solved problem --- we have many of the same hurdles which the Greeks faced, and apparently, one of the best schools which I ever attended is no longer run as it once was (classes were divided between academic and social, the latter were attended at one's age level (homeroom, phys. ed, social studies, &c.) and academic classes were attended at one's grade level with teachers at the combined elementary/high school also being accredited as faculty at a nearby college and students being able to continue on to university level study until such time as they had attended their 12th year of education, with the possibility of being awarded not only a high school diploma, but also a college degree, or at least being afforded a transcript of college-level studies to apply at the school of their choice.
One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.
The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.
In what way is education not a solved problem? We know how to get great educational results. People either don't care or actively hate the solutions.
> "...Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good."
Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout.
> "Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. "
That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics.
As for the original question, "If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
> My favorite suggestions of Postman’s are:
> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet
> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be
> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us
These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.
A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.
I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class. And the culture is so much more anti-intellectual than it was back then...
None of that makes you a “citizen of the world”.
That’s just a moniker wealthy elites who feel more connected to other wealthy elites in largely indistinguishable major metropolitan cities, than they do to people from any specific place or nation.
Maybe! I hope so!
But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.
Sadly this individual has destroyed my aversion to political violence in both instrumental and moral terms.
Well it was still completely meaningless back then, too.
For a completely meaningless notion you do seem able to dispute its meaning in the sibling thread.
Not that it matters much to me whether it was or is meaningful or not. Nostalgia is simply a feeling that doesn’t imply much about its object.
I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas). Arguably, the most important skills going forward are the ability to think independently and critically, to adapt to new circumstances, to formulate one's thoughts in a coherent and convincing manner, and to understand things in a broader historical perspective.
I'm not sure how widespread this meme (in the general sense, not the internet fad sense) is, but I came across it theorized by this humanities account, Adam Walker - Close Reading Poetry:
The New Renaissance is Coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvixEyV10Q
Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well. If you ask me, my prediction is that humanities and liberal arts as organized schools of thought are going to fall even more to the wayside unless you’re very rich. It’s going to be replaced by cultural memes and other short relatable digestible pieces of “community” knowledge kind of like a lot of the youth already.
> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal
I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.
While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.
What the hell does “demand better” even mean here?
Like global economic and political systems has a manager you can demand to speak to like a Karen getting subpar customer service?
Any change is going to require wide spread spiritual and moral change in the general populace first.
Humans as individuals and groups will fight tooth and nail to "have more" because that is our nature. Money was a brilliant invention that allowed people to get what they want without forcefully taking it from someone else, or having a particular skill or thing that you could barter.
No they won't..like, observably they won't. This is a problem almost every entrepreneur who looked at small businesses as a start up opportunity ran into immediately: most small businesses are run by people who are exactly happy with where they got to, and so showing up and promising you'll expand the business goes over as well as a lead balloon.
People are generally fine with a personal decision of "I have enough" they are much less happy about being told that by a government.
Exactly. Making money is a means to an end.
For those for whom making money is a primary goal, they miss their essential purpose in life.
OK so how do you acquire everything you need in order to achieve your essential purpose, without making money?
That’s just a random platitude that everyone will agree with, but has no workable means of achievement in the real world.
You can demand whatever you want, but most people are not going to be with you. Very few people at least in the US are going to agree with the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor. You can suggest some form of workable socialism, which would be good, but I am mainly referring to the transition phase between now and some sort of utopian future where resources are unlimited and robots do all of our physical and mental labor. That transition period is going to last decades or for the rest of our lives and most of the early period, at the very least, for our kids.
Why are you guys so obsessed with money? You can live a perfectly good life with little wealth if you want to, humans are really great at adapting.
>Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well
What you've just stated is a Marxist/materialist perspective. Up to a certain point of meeting basic survival needs, it's probably true. But there are other ways to think about what ultimately determines human goals once survival needs are met. This illustrates my point about the humanities, often we put our thinking into boxes without realizing that the box exists at all.
To be adaptive. That's going to be the most valuable skill going forward, to be able to adapt to any and all circumstances that may come your way because it is going to be a rough ride for at least the next decade and possibly much longer than that.
I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.
That's always been an important skill (at least in the last couple hundred years as far as I can tell).
Industrial revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, the shift of technology over time.
Hell, they say that the reason millennials are so nostalgic and enjoy childish things is because of rapid technological and societal change in the last 30 years.
I doubt it'll slow down, the era of doing anything until you die was a foolish thing for even our grandparents generation.
That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree. In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture. It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels. Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
> That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree.
I strongly disagree with that.
> In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture.
Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere. One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal.
> It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels.
Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
> Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it.
The time when a single skill would get you from the cradle to the grave is over and done with. And probably has been for a while but it is going to be much more fractured going forward.
School only worked for me because it forced structure onto my learning. Live lectures rarely engaged me, math and physics aside. So traditional teaching wasn't the draw. What mattered were the guardrails: quarterly exams, a peer group to measure myself against, and a pace that forced me to push past initial boredom until a subject clicked.
Without clear goalposts, external accountability, and support, self paced learning feels like running in a desert. You just end up going in circles. That’s exactly why MOOCs never worked for me, nor for thousands of others.
Your description feels very apt. I was great in a classroom but I've done poorly learning alone outside of it. Do you have any recommendations on how to pick up new subjects and material after college?
Teach him well the thing you cannot avoid teaching: how to raise a child.
> That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what.
Partially agreed.
Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.
It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.
The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.
So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.
Based on my experiences with the teachers my kids had a decade or so ago, all you would have to do is find a way to test for it and then put it on the state-mandated test that is used to evaluate schools.
Often the only thing that is taught is what is on those tests.
While I agree with this, it seems like by this measure the educational system is failing in most places.
>become a good person
>become a good citizen
>make the world better
That's basically the whole game right there. Or as Hillel might say, the rest is commentary.
The sort of slop they tell children. Adult world is far more complicated than that.
The dissonance is deafening. Especially since the most successful people in our society are not doing any of those 3 things.
In fact, most extremely successful people are doing the opposite of those three things and directly deriving their success from it.
If I could stomach being an "Optimal Machiavellian Dad" I would tell my kid:
1. Use people to get what you want.
2. Always take more than you give.
3. You're the only one who matters. Don't empathize with others.
That's the mentality that is consistently rewarded in society today.
The adult world doesn't have to be far more complicated than that.
>good person >good citizen >make the world better
Could essentially be saying, obey and work. A lot of people won't agree that is the ideal life. If that's not how you interpreted it then you have my point.
In free countries, being a good citizen also means criticizing your government when you see it making mistakes.
Dissent can be patriotic.
Questions are more powerful than answers. My kids are 29 & 31 now. I'd suggest that they master how to ask well formed questions. Also, "The medium is the message" is from Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964)
How would you recommend they learn to ask well-formed questions?
So long as the primary purpose of school is to babysit children while their parents "work" it can never be supplanted by anything educational.
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”
That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."
I really like that paragraph in the article. We have more access to knowledge and other resources than ever in history, and yet not everyone is a Renaissance Man.
Availability of resources does not entail skill in leveraging them. I'm not sure classical eduction is the best way to learn that, but it's certainly better than nothing and a useful first step.
capable, tenacious, kind
Tangentially related, but thinking about what to teach your kid years into the future before it's even born has a bit of an unhealthy touch to it. Take it step by step and especially don't pressure your kid with high expectations.
For me - it’s a love of reading, music, and intellectual curiosity. From there most everything else follows.
We finally have a chance to bring up our kids with kindness as the main charesterstic to improve. Given they wont have to compete for limited resources like we had. We get crushed, scammed and trampled on if show any kindness.
"as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us"
That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.
Teach your children about the things you love. Partially because children often don’t fall far from the tree, and mostly so they can learn how to enjoy something.
If I were to distill my educational opinions into a soundbite, it would sound very similar to the rule of happiness on submarines:
“Teach them to create more happiness than they destroy, for others as much as themselves. For we are a finite planet, with nowhere else to go, and thus we all have an obligation to make this sole home the best and happiest place it can be.”
It’s to not bet that tomorrow’s solution might solve today’s problems, but to fix them as they arise. It’s cleaning up your own messes rather than relying on others to clean up after you. It’s not self-sufficiency, but planetary sufficiency, and navigating the impossibly complex systems that influence and impact those outcomes.
Let the children choose their specifics, and connect them with educators and mentors who will nurture their unique learning styles and growth patterns to full blossom. Otherwise, teach them that there is a finite amount of happiness on this planet, and we must do our best to ensure there’s always enough to go around for everyone.
And most importantly of all, never let someone else convince you that you or your passions are irrelevant or replaceable. Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.
>Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.
You can keep toiling for mud pies. The way I see it, there are two options: let go or be dragged
How to determine what is true, and how to avoid being deceived?
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.
I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.
Curiosity, and problem solving.
Curiosity and problem solving have been automated and will be obselete in the next release.
> and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?
Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore.
5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there.
Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling.
Institutions are meh. My bet is on individuals.
!!!HN Trigger Warning!!!
Perhaps Palo Alto isn't representative, and in fact might be doing some things wrong?
Survive..and how to be happy with less.
Survival skills.
Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.
That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.
Curiosity. Empathy.
Teach them to backflip. Nothing will replace the body they are born in.
Make a fire Make bread Make music
Well since the world has just restarted the geopolitical situation from before WW2 (every country for themselves), how about you help your son to become a doctor? You know, a medical doctor. It will require lots of teaching.
The US has somewhat stepped out (been forced out of the arbiter role, frankly, much to everyone's delight) and this was supposedly going to be bad for the US since "everybody else will step in and get the goodwill the US gives up" ... and it's pretty clear now that in reality nobody stepped in and the animus to step in is at an all-time low and dropping further. It has to get a lot worse before we'll even consider (spending the money) to make it better again.
And, no worries! The EU will save us! Or so they claim ... what they mean is they will use economic sanctions to fix things! (They're "free", as don't require budget allocations and so no political conflicts, and very useful for political corruption). Except of course free is between quotes because there is a reason every economist hates them: they are in fact more expensive than just about anything else. But no budget line item!
Oh, in negotiation theory I'm of the opinion that economic sanctions cause wars rather than solve them. Wars are started because one party feels they can improve their economic situation through physical conquest. Add sanctions and there's two options: give in to sanctions (which means you have lost the war, and so have to give up anything the sanctioning side wants, or they'll just sanction you again), or win the war (which will give the opposing side no choice but to give up sanctions, since there's nothing to be gained anymore, and the sanctions will hurt them too). Obviously this means it's not just dictators that will react to sanctions with aggression, everybody will. There's even the problem that they may generate the worst possible outcome. Situation: 2 parties are at war. Someone imposes economic sanctions "to help", but sanctions inevitably also hurt others. Shortly afterwards 5 parties are at war. Oh, and historically economic sanctions have caused far more wars than they have solved, and have in fact dragged more countries into wars they initially didn't participate in.
So that's what the world has decided to do (not the US, in fact I would argue the US was the party that had the least to do with this decision, because the US absolutely didn't choose to lose it's overwhelming economic and military advantage, everyone else very slowly took it away without taking over security. Deciding, in fact, again and again and again, to let security slip further. This was not "a slippery slope", but governments worldwide taking vote after vote after vote to never do anything about an aggressor, time and time again. But, of course, this is not how it will be presented in the press)
Anyway back to why doctor would be good:
1) lots of them will be necessary since obviously lots of countries will be free to wage war on one another without having to face the US as well and so ... they will wage war on one another
You know, what the UN GA, and the "non-aligned movement" have worked for, for decades now. I feel like someone should walk into that meeting, smile like doctor Strange did at the end of that movie, and point out the obvious to these delegates that finally got what they wanted for decades: "Congratulations! You just got everything you ever wanted. You're NOT going to like it!"
2) the rest of the world will get more and more entangled with specific conflicts (Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, no doubt dozens of conflicts that probably have already started but they're not on the news constantly yet ...) and will feel the necessity to "interfere", which will bring loads of countries into one war or another
This will be especially true since those countries that have started small wars are where our raw materials are mined (you know, what we absolutely positively cannot do without).
3) doctors don't have to fight, even an army in a desperate situation would be mad to send doctors to the front
4) not only do they not have to fight, BOTH sides actively avoid attacking doctors. Even hamas has shown consideration for Jewish medical facilities in their attacks.
5) oh and doctors are both an absolute necessity and the ultimate luxury in one neat package, so doctors do well during economic disaster periods AND during periods where things go well
6) it's actually hard to be a doctor, so there won't be excessive competition and your kid will actually learn a lot
7) anything a doctor does is good. It a very morally unambiguous profession, and lots of people will be forced to make questionable choices in the next decades ... and doctors have the moral luxury that they simply will do their best to minimize the impact of those decisions on actual living humans. That impact will be horrible, obviously, but a doctor can actually help
how about you help your son to become a doctor? You know, a medical doctor.
I don't know. I was at my doctor's office a few weeks ago, and the topic of AI came up during our conversation[1]. I expressed the opinion that her profession should be fairly safe because it's so highly regulated and how doctors have the AMA to block new entrants. She said that her and her colleagues had literally just been talking about how they are worried about their jobs, and pointed out that with profit-obsessed private equity firms taking over more and more medical practices, she thought they very much would be trying to replace human doctors with AI. And she alluded to the AMA being a much less effective lobbying body than what I, as an outsider to the field, had perhaps believed.
I dunno. That's just an n=1 anecdote, but if nothing else it shows that (at least some) doctors are not just sitting back and resting easy, assured of a future of high paying career options. And this is a lady with a degree from Yale, who is a Doctor of Internal Medicine, and working for a very large and prestigious medical practice. Not some half-educated nitwit at a random back-country medical practice.
[1]: I mentioned that I'd asked ChatGPT about some test results, and told her what it told me. She replied "Yeah, I agree with that." Then chuckled and said something like "God, did I just agree with ChatGPT?" That's what started the whole sidebar about AI.
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I feel the word 'son' carries a lot of heft here - if it were 'what will I teach my child' the expectation of passing on an economically-viable craft would feel less urgent.
But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal?
If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.
> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.
We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.
As long as "being the least practiced in recorded history" is compatible with "doing well", then sure.